Over the years, Internet has changed quite a lot of things. As a non tech person, this may have gone unnoticed – we go about life as usual, buying what we need as we always had. However, it’s generally when we look at the generation beneath us that this transformation of the Internet strikes us the most – a generation that has paid for all its CDs watches their successors download their music for free for the most part, and while these downloaders pile up the dollars they’ve saved on the music, they see the next generation supporting a new Internet currency called Bitcoins and that aims to shake things up even more.

No matter where you sit in that chain, or if all these changes are too hard to follow, there is no getting away from the question of what will happen to capitalism in the future, and if the Internet will eventually be responsible for its collapse or transformation.

Does the Internet collaborate to the end of capitalism?

If we look at this from a very broad perspective, it might just be the case. With the Internet, people are becoming more and more self-sufficient and resources that were once considered as being worth paying for are becoming free and unlimited. One of these main resources we all need is information. We can already witness what the worldwide sharing of information has done to the industries of music and books. What used to be physical products with a price tag are now floating around the web from hand to hand, and they do so in such abundance, that people are constantly questioning whether or not they should pay for them. The previous motivation in accumulating physical goods is slowly fading away with the things that we buy being more and more digital, and the desires of customers are certainly being transformed in the process. Customers have many more options and are more savvy when it comes to price and quality, makiing it more competitive to make a sale.

Any information can be seen as expertise

The advice, health tips and consulting we used to search for in the real world is now replaced by a one-stop location called Google. This takes away another method that was previously a great way to make profit – being that one person that held some kind of knowledge in your region was, in the past, an absolute winner of a strategy to make money. Now, it is possible that people will find a better alternative from someone anywhere around the world. Now this could mean more that capitalism is transforming rather than ending, because people are more likely to spend on different stuff. But what is motivating today’s buyers, or rather the next generation of buyers? Many industries seem to currently be struggling which is forcing them to look at their business model. Some are finding ways to divide their products into several parts so that we pay more. We’re more likely to pay a small price several times than a big payment.

The next industry that could be hurt by the web?

Manufacturing. The appearance of 3D printers is about to make a big impact on the world by giving the average consumer the ability to print out real objects made of plastics and to trade the blueprint of these items on the web. The possibilities are just about endless with these printers and they actually come straight from what was used in various industries to build prototypes. The company HP is about to be the first giant player to enter the market and that could soon mean the ability to print out your own items from home. A quality machine costs around $2000 in 2014, but naturally as its price drops it will become a widespread way of obtaining what you need with a push of a button, and at a small cost. Again, the handful of resources coming our way and the elimination of the middlemen brings questions on how this will impact our long standing economical system that has served us well for several centuries.

Summary

The Internet probably isn’t ending up to be the tool that we predicted. What a lot of people thought would only be a way to “shop from home” has transformed into an entirely different beast, and surely with the ability to manufacture actual items from home and to get a bunch of stuff we previously paid for absolutely free. The web is ready to shake things up more than expected. The timeline of this transformation is certainly the hardest thing to predict, but we can all at least put a fair bet on the fact that capitalism as we know it won’t be the same 10, 20, 30 years from now.